35-Year Veteran Appointed Amid Other Leadership Moves At Agency

NASA announced that Vanessa Wyche, Director of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, has been named Acting Associate Administrator under Acting Administrator Janet Petro, who took over on January 20. The space agency also announced other leadership changes.

Wyche, a 35-year veteran of NASA who led the JSC for four years, succeeds Jim Free, who retired last weekend. Before joining NASA in 1989, she worked at the Food and Drug Administration after graduating from Clemson University with degrees in engineering, bioengineering, and biomedical engineering.

In her new role as Associate Administrator, Wyche is NASA’s chief operating officer who oversees all ten NASA Centers, of which nine are civil servant field centers plus the Jet Propulsion Lab. The JPL is a federally funded Research and Development Center operated for NASA by the California Institute of Technology. In addition, Wyche also oversees the Associate Administrators for the Mission Directorates at NASA Headquarters.

The leadership of one of those Directorates is also changing, as Cathy Koerner, Associate Administrator for the Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate (ESDMD), will retire on February 28, 2025. Her deputy, Lori Glaze, will take over as Acting Associate of the ESDMD Directorate.

Koerner was a flight director who rose to become the Orion Program Manager at the JSC, then advanced to headquarters as Deputy Associate Administrator for ESDMD and then Associate Administrator.

The ESDMD manages NASA’s Artemis program whose mission is to return astronauts to the moon as well as the broader Moon-to-Mars program.

Koerner’s husband, Stephen Koerner, has been Deputy Director of JSC since 2021 and will now be the Director there.

Petro also announced that Jackie Jester will be NASA’s new Associate Administrator for Legislative and Intergovernmental Affairs. Jester was a policy adviser at NASA and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. After graduating from Boston College she served as a professional staff member of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee before moving up to policy adviser.

FMI:  www.nasa.gov/